Virtual entities in Dynamics 365 HR

Dynamics 365 Human Resources is a virtual data source in Common Data Service(Microsoft Dataverse). It provides full create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations from Common Data Service and Microsoft Power Platform. The data for virtual entities isn’t stored in Common Data Service, but in the application database.

How to configure Virtual entities, It is already well described in Microsoft docs. Please refer below link.

Reference link : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/human-resources/hr-admin-integration-common-data-service-virtual-entities

We have to follow below process to enable Virtual entities in D365 HR

1. Enable virtual entities in Human Resources
2. Register the app in Microsoft Azure
3. Install the Dynamics 365 HR Virtual Entity app
4. Configure the virtual entity data source
5. Grant app permissions in Human Resources
6. Generate virtual entities

What is difference between Virtual Entities and Natural Entities

• Natural entities are generated separately and maintained in HCM common solution in CDS.
• With Natural entities, the data is stored in CDS and required synchronization  with HR application database
• With Virtual entities, We can sync the data which is not available in CDS and can be use for integration and reporting purpose
• Virtual entities starts with Prefix mshr_ and CDS entities starts with cdm_

Limitations of Virtual Entities

Following are the limitations in virtual entities that must be considered.

• Only organization-owned entities are supported. The security filtering applied to user-owned entities is not supported. Access to the virtual entity data can be turned on or off for individual users based on their security role. Field-level security is not supported.
• It must be possible to model the external data as a Dataverse entity. This means:
  • All entities in the external data source must have an associated GUID primary key.
  • All entity properties must be represented as Dataverse attributes. You can use simple types representing text, numbers, optionsets, dates, images, and lookups.
  • You must be able to model any entity relationships in Dataverse.
  • An attribute on a virtual entity cannot be calculated or rollup.  Any desired calculations must be done on the external side, possibly within or directed by the data provider.
  • Although you can add virtual entity columns as a lookup on a grid or other UI views, you cannot filter or sort based on this virtual entity lookup column.
• Auditing and change tracking is not supported.
• Virtual entities cannot be enabled for queues.
• Offline caching of values is not supported for virtual entities.
• A virtual entity cannot represent an activity and do not support business process flows.
• Once created, a virtual entity cannot be changed to be a standard (non-virtual) entity. The reverse is also true: a standard entity cannot be converted into a virtual entity.

Note : I found that virtual entities are not available for few region such as Canada, Switzerland, Japan. Currently, You cannot use Power Automate to list the data from Virtual entities.